‘Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’ used to be the address to have or the place to live if you wanted to write to the newspapers in outrage.

Luckily, disgust and outrage are no longer restricted toratepayersin West Kent.Hardened as I am to bad taste and poor judgement, even my jaw dropped when I saw the online videos of the callous idiots celebrating bonfire night by burning an effigy of the Grenfell tower.

It turned outthat they were as carelessas they were callous. They shared the video onWhatsapp;being lured into a sense of false security perhaps by its ‘this isa highly encrypted app’ notice. It took one click from a disapproving ‘friend’ to move it to twitter and send it viral.

Actually, I’ve felt a similar wave of disgustbefore. I used to live near Lewes in East Sussex where they have a famous bonfirenight celebration.

Thousands of people march throughthroughLewes each year downcramped dark streets following a procession of an enormous effigy of amuch-hated public figure. The originally despisedGuido Fawkes soon got replaced with the pope, but the hate didn’t stop with the pope. Hate never stops with one person.

The Lewes celebrations feel scarily like aKluKlux Clan eventmorphed-to-Sussex. They light seventeen flaming crosses,which they carry through the town. And they are imaginativewith their hate. Each year they burn someone new.

This year they burnt effigies of Teresa May and Boris Johnson. They have previouslyburnt VladimirPutin, Angela Merkel and Osama Bin Laden.

I’m not sure I can see a great deal of difference between the celebration of burning public figures in Lewis and theGrenfell tower model. It’s true that the Lewes effigies are public figures, but just because they have decided to run for public officedoesn’t meanthey deserve to be treated aspeople who should be burnt in public.

But there’s the class thing too.The Lewes Bonfire society is a solidly bourgeois organisation. The Grenfell mockers sounded more ‘white-van-man’ on the video.

I couldn’t help wondering if reading the Guardian instead of the Sun givesits devotees something of a free pass for hate. Jeremy Corbyn’s inner circle of the Labour Party seem to be quite ‘comfortable’ with itsanti-Semitism, but only too glad to excoriate anyone else for Islamophobia?‘’

Is hating then only off-limitsunlessitsdirected towards Jews? Thisis notanhonourable position to takeat any point in history, but particularlynot when we live as we doin the shadow of Auschwitz.

If the Grenfell effigy burners weren’t sick enough on their own, the involvement of the police made it a great deal worse.

I’m not sure what sign of public contrition would have been acceptable, but I didn’t expect the Grenfell mockers to go down to the local police station and hand themselves in.

The reaction of the police was to arrest them under the Public Order Act of 1986. It’s designed to cover people who are guilty of causing intentional harassment or distress by the use of threatening behaviour or signs.

It should have been obviousto themorallytrigger-happy police that since the original video had been kept private, and only leaked by other people,that this was a charge that would never stick.

And that brings us to the most frightening aspect of it all. How have the police come to think that it’s their responsibility to treat people whose behaviour is stupid,disgusting or reprehensible as criminals?

And if the Grenfell effigy idiots are criminals under the Public Order Act, why aren’t the Lewes Bonfire Society?

I suspect that this need to use the criminal law to control people whose attitudes wedon’t like comes from amisreading of human nature.

There are two viewscurrent in our society.The recentand popular one is that people are basically morally good and just need a bit of extra social pressure to shape up.

The older one is that humanity is a complex mixture of good and evil. The problem both views face is how to make people good?

Inviting the Grenfell mockers to meet some of the victims of the fire, still raw in theirgrief and misery might be more effective than threatening to lock them up. They might find their attitudes were more radically changed throughlistening to the pain of bereavement and miserythanbeing criminalised for having atrociously bad judgement at a private bonfire party.

Standing alongside people in their suffering and being willing to learn about thedepth oftheirpain and distress,has been a far more effective way of transforming evil into good andhatred into compassion in the history of our culture.

If the Lewes Bonfire Society had given more thought to the symbolism of the crosses they carried through the streets than simply setting fire to them, it might have helped change a culture of hate into one of compassion.